When I try to click a link on the dope I get taken to a blank white page straightdope.com something something something.
The search function does the same thing for me.
I can follow the links to the forum and faq and read all the rules and threads but it seems that outside links won’t work for me but only on this website another Forum that I’m a member of everything works fine just checked it in the last five minutes.
Any help would be appreciated thanks.
I have continued exploring and searching, some links work for me some don’t.
I don’t see a pattern to this, one of the outside links that didn’t work was a YouTube link.
In the who’s the prettiest actress thread some of the picture links work some don’t.
Just checked the links in the prettiest actress thread, all fine including the Youtube one. Sometimes with these problems it helps to paste the link you want to get to into your address bar rather than clicking it. That will get round any problems that you’re having with clicking the links on the board. It’s only a temporary fix though until ecg or one of the other mods can look at this.
Possibly a viglink problem. Viglink is an ad revenue service the board uses, which redirects the links through their site to track clicks. Our sometimes bungles the link in the process.
Our search engine here is admittedly a bit wonky. Unfortunately, it’s part of the software we use and therefore can’t easily be fixed. There are some search terms it doesn’t like, and some combinations of terms that it doesn’t like. Sometimes you can get it to work if you rearrange the terms, sometimes you can’t. Depending on what computer/operating system/browser/etc you are using, you can get the white page that you describe, or you might get some sort of error message.
If the search engine is misbehaving, you can use google instead. See here:
HOWTO: Search the SDMB using Google
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=638051
The search engine doesn’t affect other links though, and since you are seeing problems with links in general, I also suspect that viglink is the problem. Viglink is an ad service that counts clicks on links and gives us money (a fairly small amount, I think). When it works properly, it’s transparent to the user. You click on a link, viglink counts the link, and forwards you to wherever the link goes. When it doesn’t work, you can have all kinds of stuff happen. You can get pages that fail to load, you can get massive slowdowns, you can get error messages saying you don’t have permission to access the page, all kinds of stuff.
Viglink is also known to change links to one of their paid sponsors, though supposedly they’ve turned that off for our site.
We’ve had enough problems with viglink over the years that I basically classify them as malware, but we moderators don’t get any choice in the advertising here. As annoying as it is, it helps keep the lights on here.
You can opt out of viglink by going here: Privacy Center - Sovrn, Inc.
You can also add viglink.com to your ad blocker (assuming you have an ad blocker), or you can use a script blocker to prevent it from running. Note that a blanket script blocker on the SDMB will break some of our board’s features though. I have my script blocker set to allow anything from boards.straightdope.com but block pretty much anything else from here.
Even though the search engine can give similar symptoms, I think viglink is probably the root of both of your problems.
Thank for the replys.
The problem may be with my smart phone, I’m not IT guy. My electronics usefulness ends at audio tubes…ooooold tech.
I’ll paste links and search thru Google.